It appears that Comrade Sylwester has a soft spot for Russia’s ambitions in the near abroad.
Puzzle me this. Why does the same Russian Federation have such tender fraternal concerns for the self determination of national minorities in Georgia after destroying Grozny to prevent the succession of Chechnya? Could it be that the micro states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia would have no long term choice but union with Russia?
There is plenty of boneheadedness to go around in the Caucasus. Saakashvili has used the Rose Revolution and threats from Russia to create a near dictatorship. Georgians in general have guaranteed decades of poverty by replacing the Cyrillic alphabet with the ancient Georgian script, sans ascii code. Russians are eager to prove that they still have some kind of military competence and the Caucasus is a splendidly isolated and *safe* place to do so. (Also, an opportunity to send a strong message to Yushchenko and others … )
Far from being the mischief maker, the US is in it’s typical posture of muddling through a maze of imcomprehensible hillbilly feuds.